‘Game of Thrones’ Did Some Insane Things To Prevent Season 8 Spoilers From Leaking

When it comes to franchises like Marvel, Star Wars and Game of Thrones, studios and networks are known to take some pretty major precautions to prevent spoilers from leaking. Lucasfilm will print scripts on impossible-to-copy red paper, Marvel actors won’t get full scripts, and GoT stars even got self-destructing scripts in true Mission: Impossible style this year. But HBO has apparently taken their spoiler-prevention measures to even crazier extremes for the final season of the series.

Sophie Turner recently spoke about the lengths the show has gone to keep the final eight episodes of Game of Thrones under wraps at New York Comic-Con. The Stark told Vulture that while shooting Season 8, all the actors names were changed on the scripts and call sheets. But fake names won’t ward off sneaky paparazzi, so HBO took it a step further, allegedly employing “drone killers.” Wait, what the hell is that?

A “drone killer” is a portable device that deactivates any hovering nearby drones. The pretty scary-looking device is shaped like a massive gun that messes with a quadcopter’s signal, forcing it to land and return to the owner. According to Turner, it sounds like HBO has people posted up with these around the GoT sets to knock out any snooping paparazzi drones from leaking secrets. That’s a great solution, but also kind of insane considering these new devices are mainly being used for emergency situations by military and police. In a recent story by the Los Angeles Times, a police officer said the devices are “pretty much for a life-or-death situation, to save lives.” Or, like, prevent spoilers for a TV show.

Turner revealed some other interesting intel about Season 8, noting that they shot fake scenes for the final episodes. That’s nothing new for GoT – remember the Shae fake-out in Season 6 when Sibel Kekilli came on set to throw off fans? – but this fake-out sounds much bigger. “We got into costume in Croatia because we know the paparazzi lurk around there, so we would spend like half a day doing nothing,” Turner said.

So that must mean some King’s Landing sequences were faked. Could she be talking about – and spoiler alert – those mysterious leaked photos of Cersei, Jon, and The Mountain meeting? Perhaps that isn’t a real scene, or Turner could just be trying to throw off fans. Honestly, no one will know till next year whenever the heck Game of Thrones returns, sometime in the “first half” of 2019.